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Ahoy! There Be Pirates In Key West!

Klaus Chroszielewski walks the plank during a Key West pirate festival

KEY WEST (CBS4) — Aye, who be that buccaneer a’walkin that plank? It be Klaus Chroszielewski, winner of the National Walk The Plank Championship Saturday in Key West.

Chroszielewski won the competition dressed as King Neptune in Key West’s annual competition that attracts hundreds of costumed pirate enthusiasts to the town’s week-long annual Pirates in Paradise festival, according to Andy Newman, spokesman for Florida Keys News Bureau.

Pirate re-enactors from around America competed in the soggy sporting challenge dressed in colorful pirate attire. They lined up and plunged from the historic topsail Schooner Wolf into the water after pleading for mercy or attempting to outwit the scallywags forcing them off a narrow plank.

Challengers were judged on their pleas, piratical garb, plank-walking style and splash.

Events included tall ship sailing excursions and attacks on “land forces,” pirates’ living history encampments and the re-enactment of an 18th-century pirate trial.